Automobiles bring a wide range of conveniences as well as fatalities. In 2012, the reported number of fatalities from road accidents was 30,800 in the U.S. alone. Of these fatalities, 23.1% involved lane control—i.e., merging or changing lines or driving on curvy roads—and 7.7% involved turning maneuvers, i.e., turning left/right or making U-turns. In total 30.8% of the fatalities were related to vehicle steering maneuvers.
As most of these fatalities had resulted from the driver's careless or erroneous steering, those accidents could have been minimized or prevented if effective safety mechanisms had been deployed in the vehicles. There has been an on-going push for incorporating electronic safety features in vehicles to assist drivers' steering.
Many existing driving assistance systems, such as lane-departure warning or lane-keeping assistance, are exploiting the advanced built-in sensors (e.g., cameras, radars, and infrared sensors), or utilizing existing sensors on smartphones to detect the steering maneuvers in order to assist driving. However, these approaches suffer two limitations: many built-in sensors are only available on newer high-end cars, and hence such safety solutions cannot be applied to a wide range of type/year models of cars; and both built-in sensors and smartphone-based applications overly rely on cameras to get road information. Although such systems claim that smartphone cameras are sufficient in assisting the driver, they have limitations in terms of computational overhead and inaccuracy. The accuracy of camera-based approaches depends on visibility, thus render ineffective in various driving conditions with limited visibility.
Alternatively, smartphone sensors, such as gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, etc., can be exploited to detect vehicle steering maneuvers and thus perform the same steering-assistance functionalities that would have been achieved with use of cameras. These camera-free approaches have advantages of requiring much less computational resources and power, and also being immune to visibility distortions. However, it is known to be very difficult to differentiate the steering maneuvers, which is one of the main reasons for camera-based approaches being most prevalent.
This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.